"almost always [...] wisdom" - Is this sarcasm? Maybe you work in a domain where that is the case but in my experience it's almost always not memory allocation or GC. "Wisdom" if there is any comes from measuring things properly and finding out the hard way that it's not what you think it is.

I think it's true more often than not. Also note that I said memory and memory allocation e.g. allocating too much hurts your page tables and your L1 cache.

What field do you have in mind? If it's typically well optimized then fair enough but my bread and butter is compilers which are a pretty typical approximately zero compute, branchy pointer chasing type of workload.

I think many people on HN are used to throughput oriented horizontally scalable services, where GC is not particularly relevant because:

a) You don't care about pause times since latency isn't your key metric

b) You can almost always just throw more money at compute power to increase throughput

It's almost always the case in such a system that your bottleneck is on the databases that you're pushing data through, as your main approach of "scale horizontally" typically leads to those sorts of bottlenecks.

Forgive me for talking about single programs then.

Databases do typically have exactly the same memory problems though, again this time I mean memory locality rather than allocating it, obviously with the transactional elements on top.